Spencer Hewett, founder of Skip, speaks about his company at the Bloomberg conference at the Art Institute of Chicago on Wednesday. (Scott Strazzante / Blue Sky)

Riley Ennis, founder of Immudicon, makes his pitch during the "Show and Tell: The Next Wave of Companies" at the Bloomberg "The Year Ahead: 2014" conference at the Art Institute of Chicago on Wednesday. (Scott Strazzante / Blue Sky )

It was only fitting that one of the last panels at a business conference looking ahead to next year would include the unavoidable word of this year — disruption.

Three CEOs and a managing partner talked Thursday about disruptive business models, part of Bloomberg’s two-day, “The Year Ahead: 2014” business conference at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Moderated by Walter Isaacson, noted author and CEO of the Aspen Institute, the conversation ambled through the various ways technology is changing our world. Here are a few of their thoughts:

Daniel L. Doctoroff, CEO and president, Bloomberg L.P.

On big data: “The ability to analyze huge sets of data is simply going to be used to give people more and more of an edge. For us what that means is that we need to be more creative in creating data sets. We need to be more creative in creating platforms so that people can analyze data in ways they never would have before, using our tools and our data.”

On changes in the entertainment delivery model: “At the end of the day, to have that influence, we have to have more people watching. And we have to have more people reading. And so we have to find ways around — at least with respect to video — that classic cable TV oligarchy.”

Paul E. Jacobs, chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Inc.

On health care innovation: “We’re doing a clinical trial right now for a very tiny sensor that goes in your bloodstream. And two weeks before you have a heart attack, it detects biomarkers that start circulating in the blood, because cells start dying inside. So two weeks ahead of time, your phone will ring and say: ‘Go to the doctor because you’re going to have a heart attack.’”

On wearable technology (he was wearing a smart phone device on his wrist): “It’s going to give you a different way of interacting with your devices. Today, it comes to my phone, I’ve got to pull my phone out of my pocket, unlock the screen. It takes, I don’t know, 15 seconds or something. Here, notifications come here. (He points to his wrist.) I see it. I swipe it. And it’s gone. I get news here. I get sports here. Obviously I get things that are associated with my smart phone, text messages. But going forward we’re also going to get health care information form sensors that you wear on your body … Retail is going to be changed. You’re going to walk into a store and you’ll get offers right to (your) watch.”

On an ironic social media disruption: “People are now going back to watching scheduled TV, though, because they all tweet about it in real time. So that’s a bizarre twist, going back to where we were before.”

Eric Lefkofsky, CEO, Groupon

On the explosion of real-time marketing: “Part of the reason I think that companies like Groupon have evolved the way they have is that the pipes of the social network are built in a way that allows you to communicate instantly. We did a deal for Starbucks the other day, and at one time it had been tweeted out and spread out so dramatically across the web that we were selling about 7,000 units a second. It literally took down our infrastructure, which is not easy to take down. I think it’s because these days everyone is connected. They want to feel part of a community, and they’re just instantly sharing information.”

On health care innovation: “The single greatest influence in terms of health care is going to come from mobile. … We will empower doctors to be their own little mini laboratory walking around. They’ll have access to data links that they never did. And the experience will be so much richer. There is a resistance to that experience for a lot of reasons. But it’s a wave that is unstoppable.”

J.B. Pritzker, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Pritzker Group

On innovation in education: “Most of the innovation in these highly regulated areas is occurring at the edge of the regulation. You can take courses online in college. But it happened outside of the universities first. You look at K-12 — huge entrenched interest and politics. So that is the last refuge for those who don’t want disruption. It is clear to me that iPads and mobile devices are being introduced across the board in middle schools … They will be introduced everywhere. It really has changed the way that children interact with their education.”

On entertainment’s emancipation from cable television: “the ability to (consume entertainment) and not run out of batteries in four hours, which many people in the audience probably have the experience of. If you don’t, it’s because you’ve added a big bulky battery on top of the battery that’s already in your device … The other issue is all this stuff is cloud-based, which really means data-center based. And that means you’re going to have a proliferation of data centers. And those data centers are going to have to be running a lot faster, and with a lot less energy, more efficiently than ever before. Those two things operating together are going to untether the cable box.”